Thirty years of such a high life may not have taken their toll on grace Jones’ posterior, but something is ‘rotten’in the use of the term ‘hindquarters’. it is what is at stake in such language that is the concern of this paper, which maps out broadcast press and blog discourses surrounding Jones’ recent re-emergence onto the british popular music scene to establish how she becomes framed, both through the vectors of race and age in ways that highlight her as an awesome and ‘awe’ful artefact. Accounts of grace Jones’‘comeback’performance at london’s meltdown Festival (June 2008) and her subsequent tour ‘frame’her in ways that are indicative of a process of containment through awe and artefactualisation. This is not a new process (see kershaw 1997; shaviro 2008), but the addition of her age into the mix requires a reconsideration. Across a range of different media channels, there is an emphasis on trying to explain the ‘ageless’ black body of grace Jones. in much of the broadsheet accounts of her, these explanations are problematic; steeped in a racism which positions the ageing black body as scary and ‘other’. This artistic objectification and the incredulity manifest in media responses to her ageing body indicate an awe and uneasy fascination with the artefactual black female body that has a long and complex history wherein Jones sits,‘the sleek ebony fantasy of Jean Paul goude’(Verma 08; kershaw 1997). There is, however, a counterpoint to this format with voices emerging from a variety of different media. commentators from some black and broadsheet press view her in a way that is more complex, highlighting her place within black musical history and within the disco genre itself. This acknowledges but goes beyond seeing her as a ‘diva’with all that that term entails in relation to a resistance to conventional constraints and normative womanhood (bradshaw 2008; o’neill 2007; lawrence 2006; lobato 2007) and positions her within a heritage of black female performers. This is illustrative of the tension between a tired, neo-colonial (and ageist) template of conceiving of the presence of a black female artist and from those black and progressive voices that claim Jones as a subversive and a positive presence. Jones’ continued existence within a popular music arena marks out not just a ‘cultural inability to imagine real and lasting female achievement’